Posts Tagged ‘trout’

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.
Norman Maclean

My friend Bill Barksdale arrived at my door at 6 a.m. and we made our second journey to the waters, this time the White River. The water levels were low and sluggish, and so were the trout, but I did manage to coax this 5-inch brown to take my fly. Fortunately, I was able to lift his sweet face out of the waters for a portrait, and then a quick release.

I was pleased with the kind of photo my Samsung phone was able to make, but Bill went to work with his high-end camera and took several shots to record our morning: I’m surprised that I’m not scowling more deeply as this river has required tiny flies that my eyes don’t see as well as they did in younger days.

I could not have dialed up a more perfect day, spending most of it in the river. Watching trout rise to sip flies from the surface (except for mine), thrills me to the core. For much of the morning, I gazed at row after row of trout, lined up to feed on whatever drifted past them (except for my own flies), their tails and fins undulating softly in the current. All of it produced such hypnotic sensations, and I felt that I could have watched these sights for days. And wade fishing in trout streams has always settled my pulse rate. The past week has been fast-paced for me, with much travel, many daily appointments and responsibilities, and plenty of second-guessing. I now face two consecutive days of judging art competitions, but tomorrow’s will be held late in the day, and then Saturday’s will happen in the morning. Fortunately for me, the activities are spread out, allowing me quality time to unwind between my responsibilities. And so far, I’ve managed the perfect blend of making watercolors outside and fly fishing. The week has flown by at warp speed and I’m astonished tonight to realize I have only two full days remaining at this event, before journeying back home to return to my full-time job. I’m confident that once I return home, my batteries will be charged sufficiently for me to resume my duties.

I admit that this is highly unorthodox, but I’m going to post the talk I’m planning on giving before the Samaritan Sunday School class at the First Methodist Church in Arlington, Texas later this morning (hoping that none of the class members will find and read this in advance). This is a class of adults that I came to love deeply about twenty years ago when I was asked on a number of occasions to speak before them. They even invited me to attend a weekend retreat at Lake Murray Lodge in Oklahoma, serving as a conference speaker. The memories of them have always been rich, even though we drifted in different directions over the past decades. Recently they found me again and invited me back last Sunday. Today I will close out my series with them. Thanks for reading:

Good morning. The title of this morning’s meditation is “Finding the Seam.” I shared with you last Sunday that my mind has already surged ahead to summer, that I have already booked a cabin in Colorado so I can pursue my passion of fly fishing for wary trout. I only regret that I still have twelve weeks of classes to endure. Once that final bell sounds, I will experience escape velocity. I’ll begin by visiting Mom and Dad in St. Louis, but only for a short time. I believe it was either Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain who once remarked that fish and house guests begin to smell after three days. So I’ll only trouble my parents for three days. Then I’ll point my Jeep west for a nice, extended over-the-road trip, Jack Kerouac-style, to pick up, as though it were a hitchhiker, a life that I dropped off a few years back.

I recall the words of the author Robert Travers, snickering at the reputation of the frustrated artist, and identifying himself as an unfrustrated fly fisherman. I don’t think I have ever been a frustrated artist, but I do know that I regard myself as an unfrustrated fly fisherman. It was not always so. In my redneck days of rod-and-reel river fishing, I heard people say that if you spend the beautiful day outside and never catch a fish, it’s still been a good experience, imbibing the beauty of the outdoors. Well, I knew that for me that certainly was not true. If I fished all day and got skunked, it sucked. But once I converted to fly fishing all that changed profoundly. There is a ritual that comes with rigging up. I used to want to jump out of the vehicle, and get my line into the water as quickly as possible. I always wished that I could have the rod-and-reel ready and baited up, and that I didn’t have to drag a tackle box and folding chair and minnow bucket and stringer and lunch pail and all that stuff down to the river’s edge. I just wanted to catch fish and catch ‘em fast.

Fly fishing, for me, was a revelation, an entrance into a new world. Indeed I’ve heard some speak of fly-fishing as reverently as religion. In fact, Norman Maclean opens his famous book with this hook: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”[2] I have to testify in all seriousness that Colorado fly-fishing always restores my weary soul. I take my time, rigging up the fly rod, tying on tippet and flies, pulling on waders and boots, all the while sensing the river rolling by as it has for millions of years. And then, to approach the river, survey its dynamics, and step into the stream—at that point, I feel my breathing change and sense that my heartbeat has settled down. And yes, if I fly fish the entire day without a hit, it’s still been a most magnificent day to be alive, outside, and away from the daily routine.

Ever since I read the book by former New York Times editor Howell Raines titled Fly Fishing Through the Mid-Life Crisis, and then saw that marvelously engaging film based on Maclean’s novella titled A River Runs Through It, I knew I was missing out on something spectacular in this life. Even in high school, when I read Ernest Hemingway’s two-part short story “Big Two-Hearted River,” I knew I wanted to hold a fly rod in my hand one day, and step into a mountain stream. It would be different from what I had known as a child growing up with a cane pole and later a rod and reel.
Over the past decade, every time I stood in a stream, beneath the shadows of a Colorado canyon, Emerson’s words from his very first book would come whispering back out of the atmosphere to soothe me, as he wrote: “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”[3] Drawing from another Emerson metaphor, I can testify that when I enter that place, I cast off my years like a snake does his skin, and remain forever a child. In the river I find perpetual youth. In the river, I return to reason and faith.

As I listen to the sounds of water rushing over and around the rocks, past my boots as it cuts through the banks, I hear Maclean’s words coming back to me: “Eventually, all things merge into one and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”[4]

Now, when one steps into that swift stream, the casual eye will see only a large volume of water surging past. But there is so much more going on, as anyone observing long enough will come to realize. The water is running past in channels, or separate lanes, if you please. Some of those lanes are flowing faster than others. And oftentimes you will notice that there are pockets of water that are hardly moving at all.

What the fly fisherman is looking for are the seams dividing those channels. More specifically, the fly fisherman is looking for the seam that separates moving water from still water, or at least the swifter water from the lazy current. The trout, you see, are lined up in the slower lanes, where they can just hang out with as little effort as possible, and they have their noses in the seam, watching the swift current carry the insects by. The fly fisherman drops his fly in the seam and lets the current carry it down the lane, past those lines of fish, in hopes that the fly looks real enough that one of them will dart out and take it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are institutions of American literature, but few people really know what these nature writers are doing. Their school of thought is called New England Transcendentalism, and it urges that for every physical element we perceive, there is a higher, corresponding truth. And that is where I am going with this morning’s remarks about fly-fishing in mountain streams. This morning’s topic is about that seam that divides the forces, the fault line separating the dual channels. There are several modern thinkers I wish to share with you this morning who had intriguing ideas about these seams we find in life.

Paul Tillich, early in his life, published a book titled On the Boundary. His “boundary” is the same as the “seam” I’ve just been discussing. The boundary is what separates opposing forces—it’s the seam that separates opposing ideas. It is the seam that not only divides the camps, but appears to hold them together in tension. Tillich found that boundary cutting through his religious traditions, his university responsibilities and his daily tasks.

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he described the human condition as a rope stretched over an abyss, between the beast and the person of excellence. The actual life is the journey across that rope, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous across, a process and not a destiny. Life is that narrow seam, cutting through the abyss. On one side are the traditions and on the other are the discoveries. We keep threading the path, one step at a time, between the standards and the experiments.

Karl Barth, a contemporary of Tillich, and likewise indebted to Nietzsche, used the same imagery when he described his life as a dialectical theologian. He said he had to walk a narrow precipice and keep moving so he would not be in danger of falling to one side or the other. He was describing the extreme party positions of his day, between the Protestant Liberalism of the late nineteenth century, and the Neo-Orthodoxy of the early twentieth. Barth testified that the challenge lay in threading the seam between them, always moving forward.

What is that fault line? What is that junction in the midst of the dualism? Where are the seams in your life? Well, I’d like to take the time to point out a few possibilities for thought this morning. In his first book The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that there was indeed a seam in the human spirit, but not a division between soul and body as Plato and all his descendents assumed. Taking his lead from ancient Greek theater, Nietzsche said the two patron gods Apollo and Dionysus personified this dualism, with Apollo representing our reasonable side and Dionysus portraying our passionate side. Apollo was the tradition and Dionysus was the exploration. These sides are not to be equated with good and evil, by any means. Nietzsche urged that either extreme was unhealthy. In the centuries following Greek theater, Aristotle himself urged that all forms of extremism are wrong; the healthy human soul should seek the Golden Mean, another nice synonym for the seam, the fault line that passes between the extremes. It is easy to see the two sides of reason and passion in our individual makeup. One side of our makeup is given to order, to rules, to convention, to propriety. The other side explores the drama, the new, the adventure, the creative impulse. Neither side can yield a fullness of life. Regimentation is no way to live life in its fullness, but neither is recklessness.

Another seam that could be found in personal life, if I may draw from the world of basic mechanics, is that line separating Intake and Exhaust. As human beings, we require nourishment as well as exercise, intake as well as output. And in our everyday social lives, we take steps to take care of ourselves, and we also find opportunities to reach out to others in our circle. Throughout my life, in the workplace, and among my circles of friends, I’ve seen many suffer from a dreadful imbalance, and I certainly have suffered it myself. Exhaustion occurs when you spend all you have in personal resources to prop up others, and neglect your own basic needs. I still remember the first time I heard the word “burn-out.” It was used by NFL head coach Dick Vermeil, when he abruptly retired from coaching the Philadelphia Eagles after a Super Bowl loss. He had been driven like a locomotive, sleeping little, skipping meals, and even keeping a cot in his coaching office instead of going home at night to his family. Finally, he collapsed in exhaustion and retired. In his press conference, he described his personal life as “burned out.”

Then there is that other extreme—the individual who lives only for the self and develops a kind of spiritual autism. When people are elderly we sometimes use the word shut-ins to describe a lifestyle that no longer leaves home, and experiences no one coming in to check on welfare. They turn in on themselves and eventually their world is just an internal world. Likewise there are those who in younger years find ways to close themselves off from meaningful contact. Many times they are diagnosed with clinical depression. Some are brutally honest and say they just don’t like people and prefer to be left alone. At times they can degenerate into suspicion and paranoia.

I have often in the past held up Jesus of Nazareth as a prime example of one who poured himself out in the service of multitudes, but balanced it with retreats into solitude where virtually no one knew where he was staying. He avoided the exhaustion by taking quality time to pay himself and revive. You could count on it. If the New Testament record testifies to his spending an entire day teaching, arguing, healing and resolving disputes between parties, you could then find him in absentia the following day. He is in a mode of prayer and meditation. In solitude he regains his focus and determines what to do next in his ministry.

Another seam that I would like to address this morning was brought up last Sunday, and that concerns what lies between the individual and the social dimensions of our being. I once heard a psychology teacher defining introvert and extrovert in the following way: the introvert knows the self and stands confidently in that identity, whereas the extrovert depends on others to define his or her identity. Some people are more private, so they may be referred to as introvert, whereas others are more gregarious and are therefore deemed as extrovert. But the human being functions in solitude as well as corporate activity. And as a teacher I’m just as concerned with one extreme as the other. Parents are understandably upset at a son or daughter that comes home and broods, choosing to withdraw from family and friends. Other parents are equally perturbed at the child who comes home with the cell phone perpetually in the line of vision, knowing it’s going to stay there for the duration of the night. Because, you see, some teens are terrified at the thought of being alone. If no one out there is talking to them, then they have become meaningless. And Tillich testified that the fear of becoming meaningless is one of the gut-level anxieties that plague the modern consciousness.

And finally, the seam dividing Time from Eternity. While living for two years, two months and two days in a cabin beside Walden pond, Henry David Thoreau penned these words:

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.[5]

That makes my heart flutter. In the sixth century before Christ, two pre-Socratic philosophers argued over whether the essence of life was time or eternity. Heraclitus said “You cannot set foot in the same river twice. All things flow; nothing abides,” while Parmenides argued that time is only illusion; there is only Eternity, there is only Being.

Henry David Thoreau, bending over to drink from a flowing stream said:

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.[6]

Norman Maclean wrote: “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”

So, life as a river surges forward, cutting a path between the extremes: Reason and Passion, Intake and Output, Individual and Social, Time and Eternity. At any rate, it moves forward, in a perpetual flowing stream, never stopping. Emerson mused that few people could look at a flowing river and not make the transcendental leap to contemplating life as a moving stream meandering along its path, enriched by the seams embedded in that contextual flow.

That is my testimony this morning. Life’s river is comprised of many seams dividing the channels. And in those seams are clues that offer a greater understanding of life’s choices and rich possibilities.

[1] Sermon delivered at Arlington First United Methodist Church, 6 March 2016.

When a tempera is finished, he hangs it in his house to see it in all moods, all lights, accidentally out of the corner of his eye.

Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life

I think the fatigue factor has finally kicked in. I speak not only of having a good night’s sleep interrupted, but also of the reality that I am getting tired of looking at this watercolor (and am surprised that some of my readers actually say they like seeing this, over and over, on this blog). Over the past several days, I have added small, tweaking details to this painting, and I have screwed up many a painting doing exactly this–just not letting it go. So . . . I’ve decided to give it the Andrew Wyeth test, and will let the painting sit in my home where I can go in and out of the room, glancing at it occasionally, sitting and studying it from time to time, perhaps making some notes, and knowing that maybe nothing else needs to be added except my signature. To say that I have enjoyed working on this from conception to finish is a gross understatement. The deepest satisfaction has been spent in company with this watercolor coming to term. And I’m grateful for every positive comment I’ve received from viewers over the past several weeks as it has grown.

Soon I’ll be posting new images of watercolor sketches and drybrush attempts done over the weekend involving kerosene lanterns, vintage suitcases and coffee cans. Tonight in the Man Cave I have chosen to focus on this vintage fly rod I began sketching last week. A Colorado man gave this gift to me years ago. He was an amazing Renaissance man–fishing guide, horseman, farrier and story-teller. His equestrian ranch and bed-and-breakfast businesses took him completely away from fly fishing, so I he gave me two custom bamboo rods made for his father and him back in the 1940’s, along with an assortment of fiberglass fly rods and vintage reels. I leaned one of his rigs against this Pepsi case and immediately got lost in all the dynamics of it.

Reading the Hemingway biography over the weekend by Carlos Baker has also been enlightening. I am amazed at the theories spun by Hemingway in the company of Ezra Pound and Sherwood Anderson. Reading those while perusing drybrush illustrations by Andrew Wyeth, and then turning to the sketchbook and watercolor field box has had my head spinning for several days. As I posted earlier, rainbow trout are already being stocked near where I live here in Texas. It looks as though I may have to wait until Saturday or Sunday, but I have my own fly fishing gear, waders and boots packed, and I’m ready to get out there. But until then, I’ll keep chipping away at this 8 x 10″ watercolor and see what emerges. I’m already excited over the possibilities.

Only four more days of school left until we leave for the holidays. I really hope I have a surge in watercolor interest when there is the time to pursue it then.

Spring Break has afforded quality watercolor time, and it is only Tuesday evening. Daylight Saving Time has given me more quality outdoor light in the afternoon/evening as well. The garage studio environment has been sublime for painting, reading, journaling and blogging. I moved my antiquated stereo into the garage and am now enjoying a turntable that I haven’t played in a couple of years. Currently, I’m enjoying a pirated double-LP recording of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Live at the Los Angeles Forum 6-26-1970. Standing in waiting is a large stack of blues LPs–Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee, B. B. King, Son House, John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson.

The pictures posted above are my attempt to paint a Victorian mansion I have admired for years, situated high atop a hill in Weatherford, Texas, along Highway 180. A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday, I was en route to the Brazos River near Possum Kingdom to do some fly fishing for recently-stocked rainbow trout. The sun was strong that morning, and as I drove past this mansion, I had to pull over, turn around, return, get out and shoot some photos of it. Finally I’m getting around to attempting my first watercolor on full-size paper (about 30 x 22″) with nearly 2/3 of the composition being hillside. I’m flying blind here–don’t have any idea what I’m going to do with all this grass! However, the mansion is coming along satisfactorily, and if I decide the grass isn’t working out, I can always take this to the paper cutter! That should relieve some of the pressure I feel.

T. S. Eliot has been my companion for the day. I’ve been spending plenty of time in “The Waste Land,” and am now reading the Eliot chapter in Howard Gardner’s Creating Minds. I’m fascinated with this poet, and am pleased that I can learn from his creative endeavor, even if he struggled over language the way I do over drawing. I just finished reading a letter he wrote to his brother, explaining that he chose to write fewer pieces, concentrating on perfection and making each completed piece an “event” rather than being merely “prolific” and publishing pieces everywhere. My goal in 2010 was to be prolific, as I have averaged less than twenty watercolors per year. I completed nearly one hundred in 2010. This year however, with my first ever one-man-show scheduled for September, I am concentrating on fewer and larger compositions, attempting to make every complete painting worthy of framing. I know that is plenty to expect, but nevertheless, I am trying for quality over productivity this year.

And I’m certainly pushing some boundaries. One of Edward Hopper’s neighboring artists commented that Hopper planned out each of his oils completely before he even started the composition. The neighbor thought that was “a terrible way to paint, because you aren’t discovering anything.” The critic went on to express admiration for Hopper’s watercolors “because in them you seem him experimenting all the time.” I’m trying to keep this thought before me, and push each new piece I begin in a direction not familiar to me. I don’t want to settle into any kind of “hack work,” pushing out watercolors for the trade. So . . . with this Victorian set high atop a hill, I try to complete my first Victorian in entirety (all my previous works are only partial studies of Victorian buildings, never completed), and I also try to devote some attention to a large plot of cultivated property. We’ll see how it goes . . .

I decided to add a diminutive fly fisherman working the currents in the lower left-hand corner of this sketch. If I decide he doesn’t “work out,” then I’ll crop him out when I mat and frame the composition. I’m glad to have another watercolor sketch “in the box,” and delighted that I had yesterday’s outing/odyssey. But now I’d like to finish up that Eureka Springs BIG painting. I’m getting kind of tired of looking at it and want to sign it off and drop it off.

Saturday offered a break-out day for me. I set out early in the morning for a two-hour drive west to the Brazos River near Possum Kingdom dam. Rainbow trout are released there on five different occasions throughout the winter months. The day was wide open, as my wife Sandi was attending two separate equestrian events in Weatherford. Along the way, I had to stop at a classic auto show, where I photographed a row of six Hudsons from 1937-1956. I will no doubt be creating some watercolors of them sooner rather than later. I also encountered an “Edward Hopper” painting composition–a magnificent Victorian house high on a hill, bathed in the morning sunlight. Stopping also for a breakfast add-on, as well as a gasoline fill-up, cooler of ice for (hopefully) rainbow trouth and some bottled water, I began to wonder if I would make it before noon. I did.

Last weekend, I was distracted by fly fishing, and at the end of the day, too pooped to get out the easel and paint, so this time I decided to reverse my priorities. I set up my French easel alongside the boat ramp and tried to capture this magnificent Highway 16 bridge over the Brazos. I worked as quickly as possible, mostly wet-in-wet, and then did some sharper definitional work, enough to capture where the details would lie. The sun grew hotter, my back and neck started to ache, so I broke down the easel, rigged up the fly rod, struggled into my waders and boots, and descended to the river. Like last week, I lost four and managed to get one on the stringer. I guess that’s what comes with a barbless hook (for me, anyway). The size 20 elk-hair caddis does manage to lure 10-12 inch trout to the surface, and I’ll never cease feeling the thrill of watching a riser bust the surface.

By 3:30, I was feeling weary, and knew that I had a two-hour road trip waiting for me, so I packed it in. On both legs of the trip, I thrilled to the reading of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, narrated by Matt Dillon. The timing was funny, as I encountered the row of parked Hudsons in Weatherford, just 15 minutes after Sal Paradise asked Dean Moriarty how he had gotten across the United States so fast to visit him. Answer: “Aw man, that Hudson goes!”

Thanks for reading. I’m still tweaking this watercolor and may have a different “look” by tonight. Either way, I plan to be through with it by today’s end. I have bigger fish to fry!

After letting this one sit for several months, I took it out this evening, hoping to finish it. I have another festival coming in two weeks, and would love to complete some of my unfinished pieces lurking in the shadows of my disheveled studio. This started out as a poured watercolor, and I’m trying to ease off on the brushwork, not wishing to wipe out some of the wonderful accidental effects that came from pouring and salting, mostly on the water and in the background thicket.

Compared to my other works, this is a larger piece, measuring 18 x 24″. I need to get comfortable once again with larger watercolors. I’ve been working the 9 x 12″ size for about a year, and fear that I’ve gotten too comfortable there. I guess that’s a major feature of success in creating art–breaking out of those restrictive “comfort” areas.

I finally finished this small 9 x 12″ watercolor that I started several weeks back. I had never gotten around to finishing the hands, fly rod, and some of the foliage details. I have another large fly fishing composition in progress that began as a “poured” piece. Hopefully I will be posting it soon.

This small watercolor I worked on during my second day of the Jazz by the Boulevard festival in Fort Worth. The humidity index was off the charts, and I couldn’t keep my sweat off the paper! I was pleased with much of this composition, and actually signed it. But now I’ve changed my mind and will go back into it. I believe the water surface needs more attention, and I’ve never been pleased with the color and value of the fly fisherman. I’m thinking about sanding out portions of him and trying for a lighter re-do. I don’t like how he disappears into the picture, and don’t want to darken him further. Perhaps a more khaki color is needed in the clothing. I’m very pleased with the cloud burst (that was an accident). But I’m dissatisfied with the pair of pastures on the left side of the composition. I think I’ll leave the foliage as it is. This was a quick watercolor sketch, and I think it still has some possibilities.
Thanks for reading.